Movies reviewed this week: Germany Year Zero, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Shaolin Soccer, and Clearcut.
Category: Culture
Movies reviewed this week: The White Reindeer, We Are the Best!, My Winnipeg, Shoot First, Die Later, Executioners from Shaolin, and Chinatown Kid.
Movies reviewed this week: Pale Flower, King Rat, Shadows in Paradise, and Putney Swope.
Something weird happened in 2022: I watched 423 movies.
This is pretty atypical for me. It’s over 20% of the movies I’ve watched in my life. I’ve never watched as many as 100 movies in a year before. I’ve been trending up a bit recently, particularly during the pandemic, but 423? Sure, some of them are shorts, but that’s balanced by the 7 hours of Les Vampires and the 5 hours of Fanny and Alexander (TV version) and the 4 hours of Ludwig. At the end of the day — uh, of the year — we’re talking 730 hours of movies. WTF?
Well, I quit playing World of Warcraft, and that’s a huge time sink right there. I also just got into a rhythm. On any given weekday night, it’s easy to catch a movie after dinner. If you’re not doing anything else during a weekend, what’s a movie after each meal? I joined a couple of subreddits that watch a movie a week collectively, I took on a challenge to watch 52 Criterion movies, and about halfway through the year I realized I was on pace for over 350 movies. All those neurons I’d been using on making WoW numbers go up got dedicated to making my movie count go up. Whoops. Fortunately S. is supportive of my whims and obsessions.
An aside: Letterboxd, which I am linking to throughout this post, is amazing. Also a total enabler of my numbers go up obsessions. Worth every penny I pay them as a patron, which is not all that much. It’s been a great way to find movies I might want to see, it’s way more comfortable to use than IMDB, and I just love them to pieces.
At times it was a grind. The trickiest month was October, because S. and I took on a horror movie challenge together. I didn’t love the way I was engaging with challenges in general; I love movies but I want to watch them because I love them, not because they’re leaving my favorite streaming service or because I need to finish a checklist. I am not taking on any challenges next year, although S. and I made a list of 50 date night movies. (Each one has a connection to the one before, and we swapped picks. It was really fun making the list.)
But you know, it’s like anything. If you spend a lot of time on something you love, you’ll discover new depths and new joys and new preferences. Or I guess you’ll start hating it, but that wasn’t me and movies. I’m still not a guy who can breezily analyze Kurosawa in terms of his shot choices, but I know which directors and actors make me happy, which is good enough for me.
Movies reviewed this week: PTU, Synecdoche, New York, The Villainess, Caché, The Vampires or, The Arch Criminals of Paris, Jacquot, Undisputed II: Last Man Standing, What We Do in the Shadows, Citizen Kane, Fanny and Alexander, The Hole, Strange Days, Maps to the Stars, The World of Jacques Demy, and Aftersun.
Movies reviewed this week: Ride the High Country, Shame, The Lady Eve, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, A Most Wanted Man, The Platform, The Mighty Peking Man, and Challenge of the Masters.
Nah, I don’t do these on a schedule or anything.
James Fallows writes about word processors … in 1982. Paywall, sorry. Really good reminder of what computing used to be like. The Sol-20 he was using was a pretty important machine, historically speaking.
Do you interact with other human beings on a regular basis in any way? Read this piece. It’s aimed at engineers but it’s good general advice, which I can summarize as “learn to write well.” You know how you can always find the rough spot on a floor by walking on it barefoot? People notice bad writing, spelling, and grammar even if they don’t know they notice it.
Disney ran a booth at New York Comic Con to advertise the new Guardians of the Galaxy rollercoaster, and the whole thing was an interactive roleplaying experience with a lot of levels. Disney Imagineers have been exploring this area for a while; the high end version is the Galactic Starcruiser, for example. A lesser-known version was the Legends of Frontierland experiment. It’s interesting watching them try new things.
I am currently watching the classic movie serial Les Vampires on the Criterion Channel, and I’m looking forward to rewatching Irma Vep when I’m done, and then I’m looking forward to watching the new TV show also named Irma Vep. Olivier Assayas did a great interview with the LA Times about the interplay between them all. It’s meta, and I do love me some meta.
If you like fanfic and creepypasta and meta-discourse about the nature of fandoms, you might enjoy Northern Caves.
If you like housing developments, you might enjoy reading about Corviale. One kilometer long! It was completed about a decade late for my Delta Green Years of Lead game.
The song coverage is more varied than I’d thought. For example, Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy has all three levels of coverage. “Johnny Strikes Up The Band” has line-by-line lyric tracking, “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” has no lyric tracking, and “Werewolves of London” has syllable-by-syllable lyric tracking.
“Werewolves of London” is in the Sing: Classic Rock playlist, for what it’s worth.
It seems more and more like the process that generates a Sing-compatible track is either manual, automatic but time-consuming, or costly in terms of licensing. Otherwise surely you’d want every album with a playlist song on it to be fully enabled, to give explorers like me the sense that there’s a ton of coverage?
Movies reviewed this week: They Call Me Trinity, Day of Wrath, Arsenic and Old Lace, Bullet Train, A Matter of Life and Death, Unfaithfully Yours, Bay of Angels, Felicia’s Journey, and Infernal Affairs III.
I am not a karaoke aficionado, for the record; I just like singing loudly to the music of my childhood.
So I updated my Apple devices today, as one does, and with the updates came Apple Music Sing. It’s pretty cool; like it says on the tin, for songs it works with, you can turn the vocals way down and the lyric display shows you where you are in the song — down to the syllable — and you can sing along. Nice.
You do not get any cool mixing, which is a shame. You kind of want to be holding a microphone and you want your vocals to get mixed into the backing music and maybe add a little autotune? I don’t know how that stuff works but I know I’m always flat. But it’s still fun. I just lost half an hour to it.
The question on my mind, of course, was “what songs work with this?” For starters, Apple has a bunch of playlists:
They’re what you’d expect. Popular fare, nothing too weird, certainly enough to make me pretty happy.
What about your own library? Not the streaming stuff, the actual library that only weirdos who used to buy CDs have? Welp, nope, this is an Apple Music feature so it doesn’t work with your antique library, even if you have Apple Match and you’ve synced with the cloud and all. I checked a couple of Boston songs which worked when streaming but not when looking at my library. Fair enough.
What about more obscure streaming stuff? It apparently depends, but here’s something interesting: there are two classes of song that support Apple Music Sing. More popular stuff supports the syllable-by-syllable tracking of the song lyrics:
But, say, “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” from Fairport Convention’s Unhalfbricking only goes line by line.
And coverage is spotty: Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out The Lights doesn’t support Sing, but their I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight does. The former is licensed through Rhino and thus Warner, while the latter is by way of Universal — maybe that’s the difference? No, because Hokey Pokey is on Universal and doesn’t support Sing. So who knows?
There’s no way to tell whether or not a song supports Sing without popping it open, and you can’t tell whether it’s syllable by syllable or line by line without playing it.
All in all I like it.